Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,162

alien shores of bleached dinosaur bones, lizards like gods, and I sitting lotus-full in their center, thick as meat. And I was not off the map, I was choked with parchment, when I should have been where I belonged—with the monsters and the deep, outside the grip of longitude.

But Arthur was a beast himself in those days—the tawny bear-king slapping lazily at bees with a massive paw. I contented myself with measuring his stride and analyzing the musculature of his broad back—I told myself that was enough, to watch the lion lying on his stone slab, and his mate languid in the shadows. I told myself that there were no dragons, or if there had once been, they were long extinct, long extinguished, dead as diamonds.

But at night, I would wake and my lungs would seize, I would scramble for my cliometer and hold it to my heaving chest. I would calculate the Beast’s probable heart rate, its respiration, its molting-day three years hence, until I was calm again. As time went by, more and more recitations were necessary to calm the panic burbling up in me like cauldron-brew. I was not Merlin, I could not be the old man of the law-bench and banquet-hall—I could only be the old man of the mountain, and that only by the grace of the Beast.

I longed for the mountains, the mountains which hunch and huddle like my own body, clutches of wild ponderosa and star thistle grinning in the knee-joints and elbow-sockets. I longed to sniff the baroque, three-pointed footprint of the Beast, to measure it precisely and note the length of the talons in my notebook. I longed to smell a fire gobbling up the green branches, I longed to sleep on hard ground and wake to the sound of a tail whisking by, just a little further on, always a little further on.

I didn’t even have to creep, or muffle my footsteps. By the time I heard the great gate swing closed behind me, there was no one left to care that I had gone.

The scales of certain lizards are shaped like small beads. Only the beaded varieties are venomous; therefore, if one can get close enough to a specimen or obtain a corpse for study, this can be useful in taxonomy. Of course, dragons have no need of venom, being capable of generating streams of multicolored fire from glands corresponding approximately to lymph nodes in humans. My opponents maintain that there is a relationship between reports of fire and reports of venom—that the two have somehow become confused in folklore, and that the image of the great-winged, fire-breathing dragon so popular in the peasant psyche is, in fact, a small, bead-scaled creature no more than three feet in length capable of producing a venom which may or may not paralyze small vermin such as mice and voles.

It is always dangerous to leave the mountains.

If one leaves them for Camelot, one may at least be sure that one travels form linear space to linear space, that molecules and sky-motes will behave approximately as they do elsewhere.

Any other destination is suspect.

When I first went down from the granite cliffs, when I despaired of my Beast, when I had lost the trail of its scent (bayberry and sulfur with an underwaft of jimson weed) in the Butterfly Forest, I had meant to go to Camelot. After all, where could I find better maps, better records of past hunts, better genealogical archives which might have recorded sightings long since forgotten by the peasants—in short, I meant to go for the purposes of research. I say I meant, for Camelot did not rise to meet me, as the tales assure one that it does, cresting the hills with its golden turrets to the sound of trumpets and of flutes—I found darker places before I found Camelot, places of red smoke and hushed voices. The path which was supposed to lead up the fabled hill until Camelot itself took hold and laid itself out before the weary traveler—me—like a new bride lost itself, curled on itself like the tail of the Beast, and swallowed me up. I hardly knew the pebbles underfoot had changed before I could no longer guess at the geography of England, could no longer spin my compass to the capitol.

Around me, before I could draw breath, was a town of oak-shacks and dark seal-heads floating grim in the morning, a town full of trickling wells and streets that blew dust at